Molly Magai:
Fractured Terrain
March 5 - April 4th, 2026Opening Reception: Saturday, March 14th, 5-7pm
studio e welcomes back Molly Magai with Fractured Terrain, an exhibition presenting oil paintings capturing transient glimpses of industrial zones, city streets, infrastructural systems, and the vegetation that perseveres within them. Among muted gray tones and overcast light, the industrial weight of her surroundings invites a brief pause. Drawing from fleeting moments she observes while moving through the city, Magai reimagines classical landscape painting by reshaping its visual language to reflect how we encounter the world today amid industrial, technological, and environmental change.
Magai grew up immersed in industrial landscapes, she originated in Cleveland, Ohio, later lived in New York City, and now residing in Seattle. Since moving to Seattle in 1992, she has observed the expanding scale and complexity of urban infrastructure over nearly three decades. Within these environments, Magai studies the tension between human-made systems and the natural world. Where a 19th-century painter might have encountered nature as divine abundance, Magai presents a shifting view of a landscape overtaken by concrete. In her painting, Riverside, trees and foliage sit tucked between warehouse lots, diesel trucks, and sprawling telephone poles. In this work, nature appears almost like a secondary subject, yet—despite the dominance of human presence—it carries a quiet sense of the miraculous, like a flower pushing up through a crack in the sidewalk. Within this uneasy coexistence, a veil of smog softens the horizon, rendering trees and buildings indistinguishable. Although diminished in these scenes, nature persists—adapting within the fractured terrain—and it is this persistence that Magai is fascinated with.
There's a quiet romanticism for these plants pushing through the industrial corridors, she sees them as survivors. In some cases, they appear only as a blur glimpsed while driving past, as in her painting Foliage Study, where soft, smeared brushstrokes suggest branches moving against a cloudy pale blue sky. She captures these temporal moments that are often overlooked, and gives them permanence through her craft, shaped with time and contemplations on an everchanging landscape. While such industrial scenes may not traditionally be considered beautiful, they are nonetheless an inescapable part of our current landscape and hold a subtle, enduring wonder.
- tom manzanarez
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